Electronic commerce, often known as “e-commerce”, includes advertising as well as the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown immensely with the widespread adoption of Internet technology. One particularly explosive area of growth in e-commerce is in the field of advertising and, in particular, video advertising on the Internet.
Video advertising over the Internet is supported by many hardware platforms, sometimes referred to herein as “client” or “user” devices. For example, video advertising can be displayed in web browsers of computers. Video advertising is also increasingly being implemented on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. With such advertising, the video advertisement is typically “streamed” from a server to the client device over a network such as the Internet, a wireless telephone network, a private network, etc.
A popular form of video advertisement is referred to as an “in-stream ad.” With this technology, a short video advertisement (e.g. 15-30 seconds long) is play before (“pre-roll”), during (“mid-roll”) or after (“post-roll”) streaming video content that a client has requested. Since in-stream ads are frequently used to monetize the video content the publisher is delivering they usually must be played until completion. This is particularly true with pre-roll in-stream ads. As a result, they are not interactive media and the brand interaction of such ads is limited. Furthermore, the pre-roll advertisement can sometimes have the negative effect of brand degradation if users are forced to passively view an entire advertisement before being able to view their requested video content.
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